The last 10 years of development in computers were a mistake. Maybe longer.

Instead of making computers Do More, or making them Feel Faster, we've chased benchmarks, made them more reliant on remote servers, and made them less generally useful. We brought back the digital serfdom of the mainframe.

@ajroach42 I want to respond, elaborate, & discuss at length here. I spent about 10 months some years ago immersed in the computing literature around the history of debuggers, during which I went from EDSAC to Visual Studio, but also all the other half-dead ends ends of computing history such as, e.g., Lisp machines.

Naturally, I came out of it a Common Lisper, and also naturally, with Opinions about modern computing.

@ajroach42@ciaby This was the Great Debate that was largely won by Microsoft. "Everyone can 'use' a computer.". That is to say, everyone can operate the appliance with preinstalled software. *everyone*. Apple pioneered the notion, but it turns out to be the preferred mode for businesses, who really rather don't like having specialized experts.

@Shamar@pnathan@ciaby I feel like you think this was a clever point, but I don't understand what you mean.

Programming is a specialty, and some people have other specialties. Expecting them to also become expert programmers because our current expert programmers can't be arsed to make extensible and understandable tools is unreasonable.

@ShamarI feel that it's not only a matter of research, but also a point of throwing away some tech that we take for granted (x86, for example) and rebuild from scratch with different assumptions in mind. In the current economic system I find it quite hard to do... @pnathan@ajroach42

@Shamar@ajroach42@pnathanThat's possible, and somehow is already happening.What I'm talking about, however, goes much deeper than that. I'm talking about open hardware infrastructures, where every component is documented, there are no binary blobs or proprietary firmware .Very important is also the instruction set, because what we have now (x86/amd64) is incredibly bloated and full of backward compatibility shit.RISC-V is a step in the right direction. If only the hardware wasn't so expensive... ;)

the mail servers fail. the administration is confusing because docs aren't perfect, so it gets misconfigured. the network goes down. baby pukes on server and it fails to boot. server is overloaded by volume of spam.

then the task is outsourced to a guy interested in managing the emails....... whoop whoop we're recentralizing.

@Shamar@ciaby@ajroach42 my Inner Young Geek wants to argue that actual configurable systems are actually not used in the home outside and that mail servers cross that barrier between appliance and administrating-needing machine.

but let's not rabbit trail onto that. ;-)

more my contention and question is: should we expect a member of cyberspace to be knowledgable in minor sysadmin?

I argue yes! we expect people to be able to refill their oil in cars, right?